eltoozero

Please leave me alone, if you have money to spend, make me an offer for a thing. They aren't on the market for a reason, they don't exist. I don't sell things, I fix things and make art, and I don't have any art for sale right now besides the show.

Waste of money, it’s already done. la3dpr.com/donate or throw it in toilet. watch my show

Oh yea, I like money! How much?

Sorry for the lack of updates guys; I’ve still got the junk to make more Yak Twisters, just been stuck on other projects and priorities. I’ve got precious little time to hack on it, but I’ll get to it. To all those that have emailed inquiries, sorry for the lack of replies, I do have your messages filed away and when I have a fresh stock of units I’ll be reaching out. The fresh revision will be somewhat easier to adapt into a non-rotary controller, that’s why I’m not just producing more of the initial version. For now, please be patient.

What's this about the RCA DRC 480N being a Nuon machine? I take it back, it's right there on the nuon-dome hardware page...homebrew only huh...

Yea that's the plan but it's not high on my list of priorities, certainly not above getting a fresh set of Yak Twisters available for folks who would like one. Once there's news on that front I'll update the thread.

Just a couple things for you Nuon dudes and dudettes. N501 Death I've got a stack of broken N501's; we're looking into the "no video" issue but I can independently confirm it is not the transport but is at least isolated to the "extiva" board (or whichever one is not the "jack" board). The symptom is: load displayed on the VFD display, and no video output. Toshiba has been more reliable in general and fits fatter firewire cable shrouds better without modification but doesn't have as many VLM presets, if that's your thing. Yak Twister Boards On the Yak Twister boards, the initial beta-10 batch is out and everyone that's built a controller is happy. I'm revising the board and I'll have a fresh set sometime this quarter available for purchase, interested parties should get in touch with me directly via email: lee@braains.net. I've been a bit slow with replies, requests will be handled in due course, please understand this is my second side-gig. Do not PM me on the forums, I just don't have time - please just email me.

And that's bidding too, sheesh! Too bad there's probably only like 2 people on earth who will pay that, and one of them is about to get a controller... If they were actually worth that much and there was legit demand I'd actually put effort into reversing the protocol. Math don't work: There are maybe a dozen folks who would consider paying $50 for a controller. $300 isn't going to fund crap.

Did you not get the news? Spinner is available, it's a built to order thing requiring the sacrifice of another Nuon controller. The only produced example is at the Llamasoft booth at Play Expo in Manchester, you can see it behind Jeff in his tweet from the show. I'm not going to improve the design/reduce the cost if there's no interest in the product, that's how supply/demand works. All of the info to do it yourself has been posted on yakyak in the "YaK Twister" thread. I don't suggest attempting it if you aren't comfortable reflowing TQFP48 chips and severing PCB traces under high magnification. And finally, a spinner controller is forever a spinner controller unless I design a universal board to adapt the polyface chip, that would open the door to allowing switchable configs, but don't hold your breath. Concentrating now on adding a sensitivity adjustment via an inline micro-controller.

"Buying" a rotary controller involves sacrificing a working normal controller. If there were sufficient interest, re-implementing the Polyface protocol would be the most logical route, and would give you the ability to "adapt" the Nuon to any number of more easily acquired controllers. Unfortunately the demand just ain't there to justify the development required, the market is limited and would never grow.

Didn't turn out terrible:

Legendary Spinner Input for Tempest 3000 on Nuon finally unlocked after 15 years off the market. Sometime in 2015 I got my hands on an Atari ST, having been previously entranced with Gridrunner and Llamatron (when it was available on iOS) I decided to boot up Llamatron 2112, the familiar shareware screen spoke to me deeply. I did a little digging, and hey, this Jeff Minter guy has been making really funky really playable games for as long as I've been alive, and I'd only scratched the surface...he did the NEON visualizer on Xbox 360 which was the latest in a long line of "music synths" Now I love me some electropaint and bought an SGI Indy just to see it on real hardware, so I knew I was onto something here. I do a lot of goodwill shopping and soon after learning about YaK's association with obscure systems like Konix Multi-System and Nuon, I found a Toshiba SD-2300 for $15. After enjoying VLM on the Nuon for a bit I began my search for a controller to play some T3K, then immediately gave up when I saw what ridiculous prices they were (are) going for on eBay. I then stumbled upon a thread and some tidbits on Nuon-dome.com implying that there was rotary control programmed into T3K, YaK said so himself, and there were little hints about the track to follow. The thread was being helmed by a nice fellow, Nick Persijn. Nick is a Jaguar fan who builds and sells rotary controllers for Tempest 2000 on the Atari Jaguar, a game similarly "crippled" when played without "proper" spinner control. It looked like there was some reasonable progress on the project but no results, so I reached out to Nick to see if I might help. Nick gratefully accepted my offer and indeed sent me a treasure trove of information about a proprietary chip inside the Nuon controllers called "Polyface". Nick also supplied me with four, new, extremely rare, Logitech "Brumby" controllers for the Nuon which he had been stockpiling. I had to travel for work but managed to locate a Samsung N501, which is needed as the Toshiba doesn't boot homebrew. Upon receiving the gifts from Nick and finally enjoying a round of T3K, my brother Chris and I pulled it apart and saw the "beast" herself, the Polyface1. By reviewing the spec document we were able to suss out the pinout and luckily we had access to a controller "dump" program which displays the properties of connected controllers. Of course the supplied dump program distributed as part of a "collection" of Nuon apps on a disc didn't work, even after re-burning the ISO several times. The controller dump code is part of the SDK floating around, so, downloaded the SDK, compiled and burned a fresh copy which actually worked! The Polyface is an interesting chip, it handshakes with the Nuon console and exposes various "features" on the controller to the console, managed by drivers in the Nuon system BIOS. The "features" on the particular controller type are determined by a pair of "mode resistors", there are main modes and config modes; the config modes tell the chip to read a bitmask from 8 digital input pins. There are pins to connect the rotary per the spec document, but we determined there was a hidden ground plane under the chip grounding the quad input pins, meaning we needed to lift pins... That was the first major hurdle but not outside our collective capabilities, we busted out the stereo microscope and my Dad re-worked the pins to lift them off the ground plane and hook them up to flying leads for testing. Luckily the mode resistors were on pads we could easily bypass and re-locate on our test stand. After getting past a pull down resistor built into the chip we got the encoder talking to the dump program, this was a watershed moment in the project we documented and shared with interested parties. Unfortunately I got tied up with a lot more work but the whole thing had been floating in the back of my head for a year. When SCRGE dates were announced I decided to book a booth and make it a priority to make or break the rotary by then. In the meantime we closed down our spacious 2000sqft warehouse and put the contents into a 200sqft storage, but we dug out the needed gear and got (back) to work. We got our bearings, made sure everything was still in a known state and determined our next steps, test all the main modes, see what crops up. When we exhausted the main modes that meant we needed to blow through the config modes blind. Work intervened again and we had long blocks with no access to our equipment; staring at the SDK code determined that we were looking for a properties value with an odd number in the thousandths place...signifying the presence of the encoder in the controller to the system BIOS. With that new info in hand and with new skills on our toolbelt gained in the last year we lifted more pins and got nothing, no-go, zero. After doing some probing we decided to work backwards and return to stock config to ensure there wasn't something we missed. We pulled out the hot-air station and ripped the chip off the board, exposing the ground plane and a pull-up trace going to the highest D7 config bit. More good info, we took pictures, dropped the chip back on and verified we were back at square one. Still alive. New strategy, bending the pins is getting tricky because we're currently with 12 total pins lifted and tacked on magnet wire, so we shift gears and decide to cut traces from the ground plane under the chip to isolate the pins. Off comes the chip, traces are cut, chip restored. Square one, again. Had a notion that we could speed up the process by adding a button to simulate a plug cycle, that worked! Work forward, start testing modes, got some response and some that would "lock up" the port until the system was rebooted, nothing making much sense on the properties field. Re-group, check a couple things, oh, we're in CONFIG mode, not UPPER4 mode! Switch the mode resistors appropriately, run through again, ok, properties making a lot more sense now, 800, 808, 1000!, 100f!, 300f! Getting excited now, we boot into T3K with 1000 loaded up and boom, the ship wiggled! I had noticed before the dump program would increment reliably but had difficulty decrementing, some troubleshooting revealed we had the encoder mis-wired and correcting that with a positive common lead to a much more reliable twiddling of encoder bits. But the ship is so slow! Turns out I bought 12 pulses per rotation and 24 PPR encoders, pretty low for this purpose. Lucky for us our Dad had an HP Optical Encoder with 360 PPR and we confirmed the pinout, dropped it into the circuit and wow what a difference! At this point the proof is complete, the controller works and is playable. If we can we're going to build an enclosure in time for SCRGE. All Electronics has a nice enclosure that will do the trick, grabbed some arcade buttons and re-configuring the test stand should be a simple process and we have a fully playable controller ready for the show. Yea right. So the encoder didn't have a mounting nut, and the barrel of the shaft doesn't match the other rotaries I have with hardware, luckily some scraping around found that an coax retainer nut that actually threaded on.

The key is putting controller in "CONFIG UPPER4" mode by setting MODE_A to 8.25k and MODE_B to 1.82k, then setting the "UPPER4" bits 5,6,7,8 to low, high, low, high, which produces a properties value of "1000" in hex as seen by the controller dump program. I'm completely beat from SCRGE yesterday and I've got another show today. Follow along on Periscope today @eltoozero and I'll get more details posted later on!

Sup to anyone following along. I'm happy to announce there will be information provided during SCRGE on Aug 20 regarding T3K rotary control. Pray to the llama.